Marmalade - the results show

One should remember that going off-piste with a recipe requires other, more drastic changes further down the line in order to accommodate the first foray into the unknown.

Sigh.

Thus, once the orange juice mixture started to boil away, the muslin had an unfortunate experience.

I emptied it and threw the lot into the cauldron.

In for a penny.

An hour of wearing out the lino by pacing up and down later, I realised the mush had to come out. 

Tits.

I had no more muslin (amazing I had the first one, really), and only a crappy old sieve to take on the job.  It did it, and with a lot of grunting, groaning and squishing of the ladle, I was left with a decent amount of orange stuff to further work with.

Now I had to find a shed load of sugar to put in it.  Then it occurred to me that instead of the recipe's original 2kg requirement, I would need 4kg, as I had doubled up on everything else.

I cannot bring myself to tell you the bad words this produced.  Who has 4kg of sugar kicking about in the cupboard?  Don't tell me - I don't want to know.

Yet more caution was thrown to the wind as I threw in my entire sugar supply, including caster, granulated and half an bag of brown.  This was nowhere near the required 4kg, but I was losing interest fast and only concerned with getting something orange and spreadable into my jars by now, all quality control abandoned.

Stranger than fiction, it set and has an odd paste-like consistency with a slightly the-other-side of bitter flavour which is perfectly acceptable on toast. 

Conclusion

Fuck me sideways.